uit : The Parliament Magazine, Issue 291, 22 June 2009
Michel Platini is looking forward to working with a new team of football friendly MEPs as the new season prepares for kick off.
"The European parliament has put itself at the heart of the debate about the future of football, and I am certain it will continue to play a leading role over the next five years".
The European parliament is refreshing its team for a new season. Just as Europe’s football clubs have used the summer break to bring in new talent, so too have millions of citizens performed their democratic duty to elect the women and men that will represent them over the next five years. This is a time for renewal, an opportunity to regroup and gather new strength. Uefa welcomes the new members as they enter the arena and assume their new positions on the field, and we send a clear message from the crowd: we look forward to working with you.
The European parliament has put itself at the heart of the debate about the future of football, and I am certain it will continue to play a leading role over the next five years. The newly elected members should take inspiration from the team that preceded them. The 2007 resolution on the future of professional football, which many will remember as the Belet report, sent a clear message to the other EU institutions, our member states and the world of football. The Belet report concluded that football does not behave like a normal economic activity, and therefore we cannot apply EU law as if we were dealing with cars or chemicals. This simple idea should guide any EU intervention in sport.
Let us look at this idea more closely. Unlike other businesses, a football team cannot produce anything economically meaningful on its own. The value and attraction of the sports ‘product’ depends on the existence of competitors of roughly similar strength. BMW could happily operate without Ford, but the same cannot be said of Barcelona and Bayern Munich. Football, like many of Europe’s team sports, has many features that simply do not appear in normal industries. Promotion and relegation is an essential part of our sporting culture; it ensures that our leagues are open to all, and that even the smallest clubs can climb to the top. Yet it would be absurd to introduce anything like promotion and relegation in the normal economy. Could we imagine one group of European software producers operating in ‘division two’, and their more successful rivals competing in ‘division one’? Similarly, in Uefa competitions and most national football leagues, the revenues from broadcasting are shared between the competing teams as well as with the amateur game – a policy of solidarity that ensures a healthy future for the sport. Can we imagine such a policy in any other industry?
Some believe that football has started to lose these special qualities as it becomes more commercialised. As clubs become more profit seeking, they argue, football should be treated like any other business. But this neglects the crucial fact that, while football clubs have certainly become economic entities, their relationship to each other remains essentially sporting. In other words, the internal mechanisms of sport remain the same: when two teams face each other on a Saturday, they are playing sport above anything else. The need to keep competitions open and unpredictable; the need to redistribute revenues around the sport; the need to encourage education and training; the vital role of promotion and relegation between leagues: none of these become any less important as commercialisation grows. If anything, they become even more necessary.
Five years ago, Uefa created an informal club for members of the European parliament who are passionate about football and want to see the sport retain its vital social role. We call this group the ‘friends of football’, and as a new parliament returns for the new season, Uefa will be looking for new players. I look forward to working with you.